The Journey to Jewtown

I don’t know how many times I’ve ridden the underground Métro without noticing it, but while I was in Paris last week, looking for line 7 in the Louis Blanc station in the city’s northeast, something caught my eye.

Métro lines, like train and bus lines everywhere, are often known by the names of their last stops (when I first came to know Paris, this was the only way they were known), and the stairs descending to the southbound route of line 7 bore the sign “Villejuif—Ivry.” Once on the train and studying the map of the route, I saw that much farther on, at the Place d’Italie, it split in two, one arm continuing to Villejuif, the other to Porte d’Ivry and Mairie d’Ivry.

Villejuif? Ivry? What a curious combination! The first of these names, as any Frenchman will tell you, means “Jewtown.” (The French word for Jew, juif, is a back-formation from juive, Jewess, the feminine form of Old French juiu, from which also comes our English “Jew.”) The second name . . . well, I had no idea of what Ivry was thought to derive from. (The “d” in d’Ivry is an elision of de, “of” or “from.”) Appearing alongside Villejuif, however, it couldn’t fail to make me think of ivri, which is Hebrew for a Hebrew. Might that have been its origin? Was there a connection between the two names? Or was it all just an odd coincidence?